Arsenic and Old Lace

During a slow week last month, I decided to set up a lighting experiment with some old bottles I came across.

I should backtrack and say that I've been putting off the inevitable attention needed to work on a motorcycle rebuild, knowing there'd be lots of trial and error, and more error, and frustration, and etc. So before I felt like all that, I decided to clean the garage out and push further into the project with some elbow room.  I donated a few carloads of junk to SalArmy, and found these bottles in the mess. My sister Becca gave me them a few years ago, a gift from an ancient storage box at UFLs biology lab.

I mucked around with lighting for a while, but ended up using just two lights, heavily carding off various spill with black foamcore. Mixing stuff for an interesting filler got me thinking about arsenic.

Interesting to learn: The World Health Organization contends that a level of 0.01 mg/L poses a risk of 6 in 10000 chance of lifetime skin cancer risk and contends that this level of risk is acceptable (study of a mass well-water poisoning in Bangladesh). That noted, arsenic exists naturally, but poses a risk to human health when ingested in large doses. Over the years it's been used in various medicines, cosmetics, paints and then more famously as an instrument for murder.

I'd tell you what I used to fill the bottles, but then I'd have to kill you.